Do The Right Thing -- Stand Up For Excellence
September 25, 2024
I Would Have Preferred A More Challenging...Okay, A More Insulting Tone
September 25, 2024
Opposite Peas in Polish Travel Pod
September 25, 2024
“They can’t begin to comprehend what you are” is a line from this trailer for Simon Kunberg‘s Dark Phoenix (20th Century Fox, 2.14.19), the X-Men spin-off movie focusing on Sophie Turner‘s titular character (aka Jean Grey). Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t another way of saying “they can’t begin to comprehend what you are”…wouldn’t another way of saying this be “they have no idea what you are”?
Dark Phoenix costars James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Evan Peters, Michael Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Alexandra Shipp, plus Jessica Chastain, Ato Essandoh and Scott Shepherd.
Last night I read Alex Ross‘s 9.26 New Yorker essay about the long and arduous crusade to assemble and release Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind=. It was comforting to read that someone from a reputable, major-league print publication had finally pointed the finger at the chief culprit behind the endless delays that afflicted this endeavor — Welles’ longtime girlfriend and Other Side of the Wind costar Oja Kodar.
Ross: “When Welles fans discuss the fate of Wind, the name Oja Kodar inevitably surfaces, often in an unflattering light. A Croatian sculptor and actress, she co-wrote the script, had a lead role in the film, and — as the Welles scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum has established — directed three scenes of the film-within-the-film.
“Kodar has been accused of holding up efforts to complete it, whether because of excessive demands or on account of a psychological block against seeing it finished. Yet she has artistic as well as legal authority over the work. In 2015, she made a rare public appearance at a Welles festival in Woodstock, Illinois. (The town was formerly the site of the Todd School for Boys, where Welles’s theatrical career began.) In an interview with Rosenbaum, Kodar made clear her profound attachment to Wind.
“Now in her late seventies, she is a charismatic woman who speaks in a mixture of poetic flights and pungent aphorisms.”
I haven’t seen Ryan Suffern‘s A Final Cut for Orson: 40 years In The Making, which tells the story of the assembling and completion of Welles film. I have no idea if Kodar’s influence upon this effort has been discussed or even alluded to in Suffern’s 38-minute film, but I’ll be interested to see what’s what. Has anyone seen it? Can anyone shed light?
Here are two articles that I posted, in 2015 and 2016, about Kodar’s role in the process.
Five weeks ago I declared for the third or fourth time that Glenn Close is definitely going to be Best Actress nominated for The Wife, and she actually may win this time. Repeating: The Wife is a solid double-A quality package — a tidy, well-ordered, somewhat conservative-minded, theatrical-style drama. Some may say it’s a little too stagey, but it’s as good as this sort of thing gets. It satisfies, add up, delivers. Will the New Academy Kidz fall in line? They should. Brilliant acting is brilliant acting.
Right now 20 out of 22 Gold Derby “experts” (myself included) have Close among their five most likely Best Actress contenders. (The two hold-outs are USA Today‘s Brian Truitt and KPCC’s Claudia Puig.) But what’s the feeling within the HE community? The Wife has been playing in theatres since last month so what’s the verdict? Is Close a lock for a Best Actress nomination or not? The fact that she’s been nominated six times previously is a decisive factor or not?
Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg, from a 9.26 podcast interview with Close: “Is The Wife, a film about an older, smart, accomplished woman who was wronged by a man, but stood by him, and who eventually comes to realize her own worth and stands up for herself, particularly resonant in the aftermath of the presidential election defeat of Hillary Clinton, not to mention the onset on the #MeToo era?”
Glenn Close: “Yeah. What I love about this movie is that what we ended up creating with a very, very close collaboration of all of us, is a highly-complex, very specific relationship. And I think the more specific you can be, funnily enough, the more it can universally resonate with people — they will bring to it and take away from it whatever it is that they have in their life. But it will be an authentic resonance and an authentic emotion.”
It’s 8:10 am in Connecticut. Psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford will begin her Senate Judiciary Committee testimony less than two hours hence. She’s accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who will also testify today, of sexually assaulting her when they were in high school in the early 1980s. Here’s her opening statement. I don’t see how any reasonable person could determine that she’s not telling the whole painful truth.
This morning I spotted a “Page Six” photo of the recently married Michelle Williams, 38, and musician husband Phil Elverum, 40, the frontman of Mount Eerie. Williams toldVanity Fair they were secretly married last summer. I realize that I’m a neurotic about certain things, but I had four reactions when I considered the photo. One, they look happy. Two, Elverum is only 40 and he’s already half gray with a receding hairline? Three, he’s wearing extra-baggy dad jeans and a flesh-colored, low-thread-count T-shirt. Four (and worst of all), he’s wearing flip-flops? I know — conventional wisdom says I’m the guy with the problem and not Elverum, but I wouldn’t dress this way with a knife at my back.
Sidenote: On June 2, 2017 Tatyana and I sat close to Williams and then-boyfriend Jonathan Safron Foer during a late night dinner at Rome’s Pier Luigi.
Seitz clarification: “This video essay is a collaboration between me and Kim, but the text is a slightly rewritten version of a column Kim originally wrote for her blog Sunset Gun. If you watch to the end you will see that the first credit after the final shot is ‘written and narrated by Kim Morgan,’ followed by my editing credit.”
The idea, I suppose, is that any such title seems to imply that the main character will be some kind of egoistic, manipulative, obsessive type, and who wants to spend two hours with an asshole?.
Since then three things have happened. One, A Star Is Born not only failed to win the Toronto Film Festival Grosch People’s Choice Award, but it didn’t even come in second or third. (I was told the other day that it came in fourth.) Two, a critic friend who recently saw it was fine with the first half but not the second, and was dismissive of Lady Gaga‘s performance. (I don’t agree — I think she’semotionally affecting and believable as far as it goes.) And three, a person who attended a recent screening of 50-plus types says that “it played great and they loved it,” but “I’m not sure they Best Picture-loved it…we’ll see.”
In other words, A Star Is Born is playing well, as it ought to. I said in my review that it’s the best of the four versions, and I’ll never back off from that. But it’s not playing super-gangbusters, and therefore it (a) doesn’t have the muscle to win all five major Academy Awards, and (b) is not that kind of accomplishment.
I don’t have a case against the film, but it’s clearly been over-hyped, and the over-hypers, I believe, need to man up and admit to their readers that maybe they should have taken two steps backward and re-thought things a bit before going ape-shit.
Last four paragraphs of my 9.7 review: “So what am I saying? A Star Is Born is a very well-done musical drama, and will wind up being nominated in a few categories, but it’s not (to use a classic Steve Pond term) ‘the one.’ It’s an expertly assembled film for what it is, but keep in mind that it’s basically big-studio schmalz of a very high, very hip and musically pleasing order.
“Kris Tapley wasn’t wrong about a certain kind of Academy member falling for this film, but after everyone sees it they’ll need to step back and take a breath. They’ll need to look in the mirror and ask themselves, ‘Do I really think that a reconstituted high-end romantic tragedy that works all around the track as far as it goes…do I really think this is the absolute cat’s meow?’ Some people will say ‘yes!’ without thinking, but others will think twice.
“Said it before, saying it again: everyone needs to calm the eff down.
“What grade am I giving A Star Is Born? Somewhere between an A-minus and a B-plus. It’s very good but it’s a remake that throbs with wall-to-wall music, for God’s sake. Control yourselves.”
The “third woman” whom attorney Michael Avenatti spoke of a couple of days ago is named Julie Swetnick, and she’s filed a sworn affidavit about Kavanaugh’s behavior at a series of parties (approximately ten) in the Washington, D.C. area between 1981 and ’83. She witnessed the usual (for Kavanaugh and buddy-boy Mark Judge) excessive drinking and aggressive, inappropriate sexual behavior towards women, including alleged instances of gang-rape.
(l.) Julie Swetnick, (r.) Brett Kavanaugh.
Swetnick claims that she saw Kavanaugh, Judge and others “cause girls to become inebriated and disoriented so they could then be ‘gang raped’ in a side room or a bedroom by a ‘train’ of numerous boys.” Second statement: “I have a firm recollection of seeing boys lined up outside rooms at many of these parties waiting for their ‘turn’ with a girl inside the room. These boys included Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh.”
Key Swetnick statement: “I have reviewed Brett Kavanaugh’s recent claim on Fox News regarding his alleged innocence during high school and lack of sexual activity. This is absolutely false and a lie.”
The key thing isn’t that Kavanaugh drank a lot or allegedly acted like a salivating hound — many of us acted that way at one time or another in high school. The key thing is that Kavanaugh is apparently lying by insisting it’s all bullshit. If his response had been “yeah, I drank too much back then and acted like a jerk, and I’m sorry if I hurt anyone’s feelings,” it would be a whole different thing. But Kavanaugh hasn’t been smart enough to adopt that approach. Alan Ladd‘s Philip Raven at the end of This Gun For Hire: “You lie! You lie!”
Christine Blasey Ford will testify tomorrow before the Senate Judiciary Committee about her 36-year-old recollection of alleged sexual assault by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who was 17 at the time. But the 11 Republican Senators who sit on that committee won’t question her. Like, at all. Because they don’t want to personally contribute to nationwide female-voter pushback in the coming midterm elections. In short, they’re too chicken.
And so a rightwing surrogate inquisitor — Rachel Mitchell, an Arizona prosecutor who specializes in sex crimes — will do the dirty work instead.
Mitchell has been a Maricopa County prosecutor since 1993, which is the same year when the notorious pro-Trump blowhard Joe Arpaio became sheriff of Maricopa County. (He stayed in that office until losing re-election in 2016.) One can infer that Rachel and Joe weren’t too far apart politically. It can also be presumed that the 11 Senators wouldn’t have arranged for Mitchell to question Ford unless they knew she would do her best to weaken (i.e., cast doubt upon) her anti-Kavanaugh testimony as much as possible.
But as the former head of Maricopa County’s sex crimes bureau, which handles child molestations as well as adult sexual assault, Mitchell has a certain expertise. She’s now the head of the Special Victims Division, which investigates sex crimes and family violence. “She’s one of these career prosecutors who specializes in sex crimes,” Paul Ahler, who worked at the county attorney’s office years ago, toldThe Arizona Republic. “It’s hard to find those people because a lot of people get burned out on those issues, but it’s kind of been her life mission.”
Interesting Mitchell quote: “People think that children would tell right away and that they would tell everything that happened to them. In reality children often keep this secret for years, sometimes into their adulthood, sometimes forever.” Ford was 15 when she was allegedly assaulted by Kavanaugh. She obviously wasn’t a child at the time, but she wasn’t an adult either.
I’ve been a Jonah Hill admirer from the get-go. It’s not just his nervy, envelope-pushing talent that I love, but his moxie and ambition. He began as a Millennial jokester but since The Wolf of Wall Street and Moneyball Hill has been upping his serious actor game, and now he’s a director of considerable merit. You can call me one of Hill’s obedient little bitches, but I know a serious X-factor talent when I see one.
Now, I wasn’t over-the-moon about Mid90s (A24, 10.19), his autobiographical West L.A. skateboard-culture film, but I definitely felt respect and admiration. And in my 9.10 review I included three or four blurbs that could have been easily been used in the new, just-posted Mid90s trailer:
(1) “Mid90s holds its own, and that ain’t hay”; (2) “Jonah Hill has stepped up to the plate and swung on a fastball and connected…crack!”; (3) “[Hill] has honored that straight-from-the-pavement aesthetic by dealing no-bullshit cards, at least by the standards that I understand”; and (4) “This is a fully realized, nicely shaded, highly engaging first film.”
So what review quotes did A24 marketers choose for the new trailer? Fellatio quotes. Review excerpts that are so gushingly positive that the likely Average Joe response is “Uhm, really?…it’s that good?”
According to the trailer the Globe and Mail‘s Barry Hertz has called Mid90s a “straight-outta-the-gate masterpiece.” Now that’s just ridiculous. That’s an undisciplined effusion. Mid90s is a real-deal, shrewdly honed and honestly observed film but it’s not a “masterpiece”…c’mon!
Little White Lies critic Hannah Wooodhead has called it “a scrappy triumph with heart, soul and boundless energy.” Really? “Boundless” energy? Does anyone remember Tom Tykwer‘s Run Lola Run? That had boundless energy. Mid90s is mostly a dialogue-driven thing, group shots and two-shots and whatnot. Some skateboard action but mostly a hang-out deal. And what does she mean by “triumph”? A triumph over what?
Business Insider‘s Jason Guarrasio called it “beautifully authentic.” Yes, that’s true, I’ll go along with that.
On the other hand Vice‘s Justin Staple has allegedly called Mid90s “the film of the year.” Whoa there, sunshine. You can’t call a very well done, emotionally trustworthy skateboard flick “the film of the year”…c’mon! The film of the year in what sense? Critics who ejaculate without discipline accomplish one thing and one thing only — they diminish their cred.
Collider‘s Perri Nemiroff called Mid90s “masterful” Okay, I’ll buy that. Within its own realm Hill does exert a certain masterful command.
All to say that A24 should’ve come down to earth and used one of my quotes. Because unlike 80% of the critics whose blurbs they used, I’m a Hill admirer whose feet are on the ground and who hasn’t gotten carried away.